•
FEATURE •
Turbo-Powering
the Flat Portal: The University of California's Labor Research Web
by Terence
Huwe

Even
the most cursory glance at recent literature reveals that enterprise information
portal software has come of age. Portals continue to be hot. Prices are
coming down, and many libraries and information centers have been trying
them out. At the high end, packages like Livelink and IntraSmart offer
a wide range of DHTML power and collaboration tools, though it's not hard
to find critics. At the lower end, open source products like Zope have
developed loyal followings and large communities. However, it's not always
necessary to make a new technology investment to leverage a Web site into
a content-based portal. The big surprise in today's Web portal sector is
the continued effectiveness of flat Web design.

Flat Web sites:
We've done that already, right? Yes, but in the era of the Invisible Web,
flat is good. Flat Web sites are picked up by today's Web crawlers and
can generate heavy repeat traffic. What's more, flat portals are ideal
for libraries and information centers that don't want to get into the hardware
business or get locked into a single product family. The challenge is to
turbo-power them and link them to what searchers crave most: solid, reputable
content.

This article profiles
the University of California's new Labor Research Portal, which was designed
by the Institute of Industrial Relations Library. The portal and its related
Web sites all reside on central university campus Unix servers running
various flavors of Apache Web Server software. With nothing fancy running
in the background, this tale of portal production focuses more on those
perennial "killer apps" that sprout in the soil of proactive libraries:
a focus on community and relationships, with a bias for reference and outreach.
The content strategies employed took their cue from the communities served—even
when this ran against conventional wisdom.

UC LABOR RESEARCH
RECEIVES A BOOST

Founded in 1945
at UCLA and UC Berkeley, the Institutes of Industrial Relations (IIRs)
are "organized research units" that support faculty research activity across
disciplinary boundaries. Within the IIR communities, sociologists, economists,
business professors, anthropologists, and even city planners form a diverse
community to study work and employment issues. In June 2000, the California
legislature established a new program that would span the entire UC system
and build upon the two IIRs. Called the Institute for Labor and Employment
(ILE), the new institute brought a new, $6 million annual revenue stream
to the University of California—serious money in the social sciences. Suddenly,
it was possible to formulate a new statewide research community.

This was a golden
opportunity for library-led content development. The library staff was
ready with a vision that was simple but powerful: Create a Web presence
that linked purchased digital resources with original research, and throw
some reference and outreach into the mix.

BUILDING A LABOR
COMMUNITY AND A NEW LIBRARY ROLE

Activist librarians
are always looking for opportunities to channel effective information services
to where these servers are needed. These activists share a common trait:
They diagnose the patient before prescribing the treatment plan. This is
a vital step and is often harder than it may seem. For example, effective
knowledge management strategies that work in a law library may fail at
a pharmaceutical firm. What's more, it's not just the industry sector that
defines how organizations succeed or fail in effective use of information
resources; more than anything, it's the people. In the case of the IIRs,
a seven-fold increase in funding brought growing pains—and an enormous
opportunity to create a content strategy that fit the patient.

The Institute of
Industrial Relations Library had a proven record in Web administration.
Since 1995, the library has managed Web services at Berkeley's IIR, with
considerable success. Like many Web sites, it was a cottage effort, and
by 1998 it housed several thousand documents on hundreds of directories.
Web traffic averaged 2,000 hits daily, and the top-ranked domain for visitors
was .com. Clearly, there was a market for quality content in labor
research. That same year, the Library won the John Sessions Memorial Award
from the AFL-CIO and American Library Association. Consequently, the library
could tackle the huge new task of portal design with solid experience in
Web and design—and organizational diagnosis.

THE THREE INSIGHTS

For the IIRs and
the ILE, the first challenge was to help create the organizational infrastructure
for a statewide research program. This meant getting involved in local
programs at UCLA, Berkeley, and other campuses. The Library wanted the
opportunity to create the overall Web service and focus on key value points—original
research, guides to the literature and Internet, and program materials.
Three insights about the user population immediately emerged:

Support Faculty
Independence—But Manage the Digital Content.
Research
faculty have an enormous workload, often teaching three courses, writing
grants, supervising doctoral students, and writing articles and books,
all at once. These hard-working professionals mostly want to be left alone
to do their work—unless you can save them time. With that in mind, the
library offered to oversee faculty working papers and port them to the
Web. This formed a key alliance that defined the Library as the site for
effective Web content management.

Help Allies
Achieve Their Goals.
Unlike
many academic libraries, the IIR Library is essentially a special library,
and it serves a specialized segment of the university community. User groups
include ladder-rank faculty, professional researchers, trade unionists,
doctoral students, and not least, the general public. That's a diverse
user population with a vast need for reference. The Library always emphasized
reference, and this helped form a basis for the community to come, because
the service brought people back, and reinforced the content strategy process.

Make No Enemies.
Let's
face it, the workplace is a dynamic arena where the staff and management
follow many agendas and goals. How organizations handle strife can speak
volumes about what is possible for librarians. In a business firm, power
struggles are often sudden, intense, and have a final outcome. In academia,
power struggles can last decades. The library cannot afford to make enemies
or play favorites, and the Web portal needed to be balanced among extremely
diverse groups.

WHAT WE PROPOSED

Charting our own
development strategy involved a certain degree of risk-taking, as the Library
proposed to perform new work before it was certain of new funding. Building
on proven relationships and strengths in the UC Berkeley sphere, the Library
followed a five-point plan for developing its role. Because none of the
transition planners had a deep personal interest in the technology, the
plan was phrased in plain language.

Handle All
Web Work.
Before
June 2000, library staff handled Web work for Berkeley's IIR, but did not
employee a career Web developer. In order to solidify new staff positions
in the planning process, the Library offered to handle Web services not
only for Berkeley, but also for UCLA affiliates and the ILE, which would
eventually span every UC campus through its affiliate structure. This made
it easier for the Transition Team to support the Library's overall goal—to
manage the digital publishing process.

Create a
Coherent Mix of Original Research and Purchased Content. Deliberations
among the Transition Team focused mainly on how to balance governance between
campuses and with the many professional communities that are stakeholders
in the ILE. The Library staff focused on the mix of digital content that
would support researchers in a practical way. Three broad types of information
were identified as crucial.

First, the ILE
was primarily interested in promoting broad study of labor issues—and publishing
the results not only in the usual, peer-reviewed avenues, but also as policy
papers and reports for special audiences. This was the perfect format for
a digital library of Web documents.

Second, many ILE
faculty members were interested in building data archives with data sets
from many different government agencies. To avoid competition with potential
friends, the Library reached out to data archivists and faculty interested
in data collection. The resulting partnerships reduced the risk of dispersing
various functions of information management.

Third, although
many of the transition planners were library users and knew a lot about
the resources the University had already acquired, not all were expert
searchers. Therefore, a vibrant collection of guides to databases and search
tools was a high priority for the new portal.

Plan to Enliven
Digital Conversations.
As
a university-community partnership, the ILE presented the University with
a new opportunity for building community support. However, the faculty
was of two minds on the matter of how to engage the non-academic labor
research community. Some wanted the ILE to focus on research aimed at policy
makers, while others wanted a practically oriented outreach program. Since
both ideas made sense, and in fact could both be followed simultaneously,
the Library proposed to manage digital conversations on discussion group
lists. The staff also offered expertise in interactive form-making—both
secure, CGI forms, and less secure (but quickly generated) PHP form-making.

Coordinate
Information Acquisition and Development.
Since
researchers were interested in original work and wanted to manipulate raw
data sets, a substantial opportunity existed for library staff to negotiate
purchases from private publishers that repackage statistical data. By offering
to do the negotiations, librarians could help create long-term business
relationships that would support preservation strategies. This development
also reinforced relationships with data archivists, who could house acquired
data on their servers.

Emphasize
Human Analysis and Counsel.
The
library had achieved significant levels of success in employing the same
techniques of human analysis of the Internet that certain commercial portals,
like Northern Light, have advocated. Therefore, the core strategy for creating
Web reviews was to ask the staff to monitor the Internet—using the search
tools like Google—and to track down the specific high-value sites that
lie buried in academic and nonprofit Web sites.

CRAFTING THE
PORTAL

While the ILE leadership
addressed organizational concerns like the impact of its research on state
government, the role of UCLA and UC Berkeley within the new organization,
and related issues, the library staff performed an audit of existing content
and formed a strategy for new content creation. Server logs presented a
clear guide as to what users wanted to see: new and timely reports on "hot"
issues like the need for a living wage in San Francisco, or the impact
of wages on airport safety, which researchers had already been studying
prior to the September 11, 2001 disaster. In fact, server logs showed big
upticks every time the library uploaded new faculty working papers and
announced them. Professor Michael Reich's paper on a living wage in San
Francisco generated several thousand downloads during its first week online;
a follow-up paper studying a living wage for workers at the Port of Oakland
generated similar interest. The key challenge for this portal, then, was
clearly how to make access hassle-free.

Other known users
said they wanted to find a place on the Web where they could rely on detailed
directions to rich data sets—and not be forced to slog through big, sophisticated
Web sites to find the answers. Chris Erickson, a professor of business
administration at UCLA, said, "I need Web guides that will give me specific
tables and cross-tabs of labor data about Southeast Asian countries. I
know how to search sites like the World Bank to find this, but it can take
up to 15 minutes to find exactly what I need."

RECONFIGURING
THE GUIDES

Since 1995, the
library had been publishing two series that met the proper conditions for
turbo-powering: Internet Research Guides and Berkeley Labor Guides.
The Library's Internet Research Guides generated the second-highest traffic
on the UC Berkeley IIR Web site and were essentially exhaustive directories
of URLs having to do with labor issues.

These were reconfigured
in two ways. First, the really big directories were locational tools, such
as lists of all the labor unions sites in the U.S. and around the globe.
These were edited and expanded. As a new initiative, the library staff
started publishing more selective guides to the "best" URLs—generating
shorter, but more purposeful lists of URLs. Second, the Berkeley Labor
Guides series was vastly improved and given top priority as a source of
a smart searching solution. The Berkeley Labor Guides had an unusual value
point, encompassing much more than just the Internet, including bibliographies
of books and articles, relevant Library of Congress Subject Headings, and
other finding aids.

WORKING PAPERS

The third area
of content strength lay in the Library's long experience with faculty working
papers. Since the late 1990s, working papers had migrated to the Web in
a big way. Computer scientists rely heavily on them to stay current with
archives, and the Los Alamos model for "E-Print Repositories" has received
wide attention. The Library had migrated the IIR-Berkeley's full series
of faculty working papers to the Web, handling "calls" for papers and working
closely with the faculty editor of the series, Professor David I. Levine.
Although no one on the ILE Transition Team had started talking about it
yet, the Library staff knew that e-print repositories would open the door
to many productive partnerships and to help turbo-power the portal. With
that in mind, the Library reached out to the local leaders in the field—the
California Digital Library's eScholarship project. The resulting partnership
with eScholarship offered an innovative solution for providing "persistent
copies" of research papers—with the imprimatur of the University's premier
online aggregator.

GOING LIVE WITH
WHAT YOU'VE GOT

In October 2001,
the library rolled out its first version of the Labor Research Portal.
Its main access points are the ILE home page at the Office of the President,
and UC Berkeley's IIR Web. Even before it was fully edited and revised,
it was snagged in the net of the University of Wisconsin's Internet Scout
Project and given "Scout Selection" status. This was an early and welcome
vote of confidence. The rollout coincided with two interesting publications
that were also immediate hits: new Berkeley Labor Guides on employee democracy,
labor culture, and globalization; and a virtual photo gallery of labor
art.

The "Labor Culture"
Berkeley Labor Guide incorporated lots of public domain graphics and focused
on arts and music at a new level of visual richness. It also defined a
new format strategy for the series: continuous improvement and revision.
Video and sound clips will appear in succeeding editions of the Labor Culture
guide.

The Labor Art Exhibit
was a joint effort of Berkeley-based librarians and labor specialists,
appearing both online and in physical display space. The IIR Directors
Lounge became the site for permanent and guest exhibits, with future hopes
to circulate exhibits to UCLA. The first guest exhibit was a photo essay
of a transportation strike that took place in Tracy, California, in the
fall of 2000. The IIR-Berkeley Web site hosted the virtual version on its
"Labor Art Exhibits" site, which was linked to the portal.

These two new visual
initiatives sparked interest in the California labor community, helping
to jump-start dialogue about long-term acquisitions strategies for the
library. For example, Fred Glass, Communications director of the California
Federation of Teachers, expressed an interest in incorporating his film
archives into the library's collections—specifically so the archives could
be ported to the Web. Glass produced an award-winning documentary series
called Golden Lands, Working Hands, which was shown on several PBS
stations.

HIGHLIGHTING
PARTNERSHIPS

Turbo-charging
the flat portal depends heavily on links to other organizations that employed
systems administrators and hosted reputable content. The Labor Research
Portal did not have to do everything; instead, the Library staff linked
the portal to where the action was.

Within the UC system,
the key partner is the California Digital Library (CDL). The CDL is committed
to linking vast arrays of library e-content throughout the University of
California system, without stepping on the toes of local campuses and departments.
It has built a strong advisory structure to keep relations within the UC
system smooth. CDL receives a great deal of attention for all it does,
but three particular CDL programs had special value for the Institute for
Labor Employment and the Institutes of Industrial Relations.

COUNTING CALIFORNIA

Counting California
offers access to all California statistics available online. It's another
example of a really great idea with a lot of power that essentially is
about as low-tech as you can get while still being on the Web. Counting
California brought together data archivists, librarians, and statisticians,
with the goal of scanning and porting PDF files of statistical publications
to the Web. There's nothing fancy about the current edition of Counting
California—except that it works quite effectively as a reference tool.
The Labor Research Portal links to Counting California at the top level.

The vast majority
of labor-related reference questions—whether originating in the library
or via the Internet—require statistical information about the U.S. and
California work force, or work force trends. But even though many questions
follow similar pathways (such as union membership statistics, strikes and
lockouts, etc), no two questions are the same. People don't think in the
same categories that the Bureau of Labor Statistics or Bureau of the Census
provides: They want statistics by industry, by job type, by region, and
by characteristics of the population—all in one handy table. While packaged
data exists, essentially the labor reference librarian's task is to teach
the researcher how to compile custom tables—over and over again. Counting
California helps the researcher at the Ur-level of their quest—the very
pages of statistics that form the raw material of statistical profiling
can be downloaded and reused. Because of this, the Labor Research Portal
emphasizes its own ready-reference tables, which can have a summary format.

CDL ESCHOLARSHIP

One of the biggest
challenges for a research university is to gain control of its intellectual
capital, particularly in digital format. eScholarship's series of working
paper repositories were launched in early 2002, with the goal of throwing
a net around all of the interesting and valuable research in progress,
which often appears all over the Internet on personal or departmental sites.
Taken together, the IIRs and ILE families of research units presented a
very large sector of the social sciences faculty, statewide. Every campus
received faculty research support from the ILE, and if an organizational
partnership could be achieved, CDL and eScholarship would benefit greatly.
At the same time, eScholarship had acquired the internal rights to use
e-journal software that was developed by Bepress [http://www.bepress.com]—another
time-saving feature for the ILE.

CDL SEARCHLIGHT

Pioneered at UC
San Diego, CDL Searchlight got its start as a straightforward CGI search
program and was quickly adopted as a standard for searching multiple databases
in a single search interface. CDL Searchlight shows users how many hits
they can find on a search string in all of the databases they identify
(with a default to "all" databases). Librarians and super searchers can
respond to such an obvious solution by saying, "So what else is new?" but
surprisingly few students and faculty have actually discovered and used
the program. Linking Searchlight to the Labor Research Portal had two key
benefits: It "pushed" CDL's end-user services into the Web world of a large
group of social sciences users, and it created new opportunities for the
Library staff to emphasize tutorials and bibliographic instruction.

THE FLAT PORTAL
AS PUBLISHING VEHICLE

So far, all of
the value points illustrated draw on two very simple ideas—focusing the
flat Web on high-quality content and forging partnerships with allies who
are creating the Web's next generation of finding tools and services. By
partnering with others who can bring value (and programming know-how),
the Library gained two very powerful benefits. It was freed of the labor
of building large libraries of CGI programs and services, and it was empowered
to lead the new organization's dialogue about digital publishing.

The turbo-powered
flat portal enables librarians to emphasize what they do best—organize,
evaluate, and provide access to high-quality resources—while building a
new role as publishing partners. As the Institute for Labor and Employment
begins to produce a rich corpus of knowledge about work in California,
the digital archive is already positioned for inclusion in long-term digital
preservation strategies like eScholarship, with the full panoply of power
searching tools available. It is much more common for original research
to ebb and flow as faculty members shift their research goals or move to
other institutions; in this respect, library involvement in content management
is a vital organizational talent.

RECOMMENDED
STRATEGIES

Much of the power
in enterprise information portal software lies in its interactive capabilities.
Portals are widely accepted, and most universities have developed such
services already. Portals are most often found at the campus, "college
of..." or "school of..." levels and can be customized to meet departmental
needs. It really doesn't make a lot of sense to create another substratum
of enterprise information portals at a lower organizational level, in such
a richly supported environment. However, it does make sense to maximize
the unique, subject-oriented materials that reside within the many domains
of research universities. With that in mind, the Library staff has the
following recommendations for information professionals who want to turbo-power
their flat Webs.

Point at
What's Unique.
How
many library Web sites focus on what the physical library does and describe
what the digital library does as a sideline? To distinguish your offerings
from the vast array available, focus on the unique content you have. In
many cases, this will entail original research and program materials, but
in some cases, the unique offering is your own perspective on the field.
For example, The Labor Research Portal offers an exhaustive list of trade
unions on the Web. One of our visitors, a labor historian, said, "I never
knew there was a Web site for the union representing exotic dancers!" The
value point was the library's organization of Web links into a useful format—turbo-powering
the obvious.

Emphasize
Human Analysis.
A
corollary to the above, but in the era of the Invisible Web, human analysis
has proven to be enormously important and is seen by many as absolutely
vital. Flat Web sites are discovered by Web crawlers, but many database-driven
sites are not. Reviewing and annotating the Web—even if restricted to
your own organization's key industries or research areas—is a core
competency for information professionals and can boost the value of your
Web services dramatically.

Focus on
Partnerships.
Maybe
you employ a digital librarian or programmer who can program Perl, configure
Internet Scout's Linux-driven portal prototype, or run a Zope portal—or
maybe you don't. If you don't, that's not a reason to wait for a bigger
budget. Opportunities for partnerships abound, but most people never ask
for help. Perform a "skill audit" for likely partners, and ask them if
they want to join forces.

Think Long
Term. The IIR and ILE communities reside within an academic community
that expects to be in business for hundreds of years. However, many of
the leaders of the hidebound university forget to consider issues like
legacy system access, the continued usefulness of print, and the risk of
losing digital resources by mishap or by a failure to remember that they
exist. Turbo-powered portals shine a spotlight on unique materials, and
remind top administrators of the many challenges that are attached to digital
publishing and preservation—provided these portals focus on the subject
area in an engaging manner.

Don't Lock
Yourself into the Wrong Web Authoring Platform.
The
ILE and IIR Web services run on central campus academic servers that cleave
to the non-extended HTML and the open Web in a classic Unix environment.
It may or may not make sense to acquire a particular vendor's turnkey product,
depending on how much support you can expect in your environment. Even
in corporate environments, it's important to weigh whether to join forces
with an IT department or create a library IT plan; both strategies have
worked, depending on the firm. As long you operate within an open Web environment,
your options also remain open, so choose wisely when you acquire portal
software.

GOALS ACHIEVED

With no new technology
outlays, the ILE Labor Research Portal achieved three goals. First, it
gained the attention and enthusiasm of its user community, because it provided
a universe of information and navigation tools that no other West Coast
academic labor site had yet offered. Second, it set the stage for a fully
integrated content strategy that linked Web publishing with academic research.
Fortuitous timing brought powerful allies in the shape of the California
Digital Library, which had similar goals. Third and most important, the
portal symbolized the mainstreaming of the Library into the research agenda
of the Institute for Labor and Employment, and formalized a "voice" for
information professionals in the organization.

Rather than investing
substantial effort in acquiring and mastering the hot new software of the
day, the Library staff focused on its core competencies to bring order
to the dynamic but chaotic world of Web resources. With all its options
still open for moving to enterprise information portal software, the staff
were left to wonder whether the Unix-driven open Web environment, so common
in research universities, was in fact a more powerful alternative. Regardless,
the "turbo power" that was employed had to do mostly with human analysis,
good writing and research, and a bias for action. Whenever information
professionals focus on these factors, the power of the Web itself becomes
an ally to the library, its roles, and its relevance.

Terence
K. Huwe [thuwe@library.berkeley.edu]
is Director of Library and Information Resources, Institute for Labor and
Employment, University of California.